Archive for June 3rd, 2013

It was a big weekend in the Big Apple for one San Franciscan. Adam Johnson, the newest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, accepted his award from Lee Bolinger, President of Columbia University, at a May 30 luncheon. (We’ve written about Adam’s most recent honors this year, the Pulitzer and Guggenheim, here and here.)

The attractive photographer.

Clearly talent runs in the family. The photo above was taken by his 9-year-old daughter Jupiter Johnson. The pretty prize is pictured below. I’d never seen the sparkly bauble before.

The day before, the San Francisco Weekly ran a Q&A with the author of The Orphan Master’s Son (we’ve written about the book here andhereand here), and admitted it was smitten by the 6’4 linebacker-sized author. A sample from his comments about North Korea: “This is a nation without any voice at all. It’s unthinkable. We have no evidence of a literary underground. No book or poem has made it out in 60 years. As I wrote the book, I thought, who am I to write this? But the truth is, they can’t write, they can’t express themselves, and until they can, we need to do this. We won’t know if it’s true until they can tell their own story.”

Speaking of Jupiter, the interview has an interesting admission about his work habits: “I can’t write with the Internet, so I go to the UCSF library as a guest; I get more work done there. When I’m home and I hear my three kids’ voices outside the door, all under 10, I think, why am I spending time with imaginary people?”